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Brandy Favilla is currently the Community Engagement Manager at New Horizons of Minnesota (www.nhmn.com). In this position, she helps people define and build their careers through educational events. Brandy focuses on networking with members of the Information Technology community to form partnerships in education. She strives to maintain New Horizons’ reputation as a high-quality learning center throughout the Twin Cities and beyond.
Some of her accomplishments include chairing the committee for both the TechFuse and MindSurf Conferences hosted by New Horizons, co-chairing Twin Cities Code Camp and Twin Cities SharePoint Camp, Co-host of the Twin Cities Developers Guild, VP of PR for TechMasters (www.techmasters-tc.com), Communications Chair of PACT (www.pactweb.org), Programs chair for IAMCP, President of the Business Intelligence User Group (www.ncbisig.org) and actively participating in the SharePoint User Group (www.sharepointmn.com).
*the thoughts and opinions in this blog are my own and do not reflect the opinions of New Horizons of Minnesota

Do you need training on PerformancePoint Server? New Horizons of MN in partnership with Solid Quality Mentors has a class coming up the week of July 7 in Edina MN. Link for more information: http://www.nhmn.com/Courses... Course Title: Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 End-to-End Class Overview Written and delivered by industry experts, this five-day course provides students with the technical skills required to design, develop and manage solutions using ......

Heartland Developers Conference Omaha - October 15-17, 2008 Minneapolis - September 28-30, 2008 Website: www.heartlanddc.com The Conference: HDC provides regional developers the opportunity to experience sessions usually reserved for Tech-Ed and PDC at a much lower cost while retaining the same nationally known presenters. 5 years since it’s inception, HDC08 continues to build on the success of the largest annual independent professional Microsoft development conference in the nation, organized by ......

Twin Cities Languages User Group Website: http://www.twincitieslangua... Meeting Details: Meetings are the Second Thursday of the Month from 5:30 - 7:00 Description of the User Group: As developers, we use a number of languages throughout the lifecycle of a project and our careers in general. Learning core aspects and features from other langauges can help a developer apply new techniques and designs to their own projects. This group is open to anyone who has a deep appreciation for ......

Today I attended an Events Made Easy Seminar in St. Cloud. I finally got to attend a conference/seminar that would be very beneficial to my job! It was a great training, I learned a great deal about planning, documentation and follow up. I'll highlight some of the key things below. We started out the day talking about what defines and event, who is an event planner and the certifications that come with event planning, what makes events successful and how we define success and what skills does it ......

The slide decks have been posted to the website for this past weekends SharePoint Camp. View them at: http://www.twincitiessharep... We are in the planning stages for the next one.. if you would like to submit a topic, please email jferguson@nhmn.com. If you would like information on sponsorship opportunities, email me at bfavilla@nhmn.com. We are looking at either November or January for the next one ......

Server 2008 Active Directory Services and your Infrastructure When: June 25, 2008 Time: 9:00 - 11:30 Location: New Horizons of MN Registration Link: http://www.nhmn.com/Courses... Seminar overview: Windows Server 2008 introduces a number of new features that are designed to streamline the role of the Active Directory in your environment, as well as promote a dramatic change in the idea of Branch Office Optimization. Traditionally a Domain Controller has been a fairly heavy ......

Tips and Tricks for the 2007 MS Office System Nick Stillings - Microsoft Corporation Nick is a great presenter. He has a voice that projects out to everyone... he did a great job answering questions from the audience as they came up. He just whipped through SOOOOOO much information from Word, OUtlook, Excel and PowerPoint. Some really cool features that I talk about below. Great presentation Nick! I really enjoyed it and even learned some new things that I didn't know! He started out showing legacy ......

Tips and Tricks for the 2007 MS Office System Nick Stillings - Microsoft Corporation Nick is a great presenter. He has a voice that projects out to everyone... he did a great job answering questions from the audience as they came up. He just whipped through SOOOOOO much information from Word, OUtlook, Excel and PowerPoint. Some really cool features that I talk about below. Great presentation Nick! I really enjoyed it and even learned some new things that I didn't know! He started out showing legacy ......

Tips and Tricks for the 2007 MS Office System Nick Stillings - Microsoft Corporation Nick is a great presenter. He has a voice that projects out to everyone... he did a great job answering questions from the audience as they came up. He just whipped through SOOOOOO much information from Word, OUtlook, Excel and PowerPoint. Some really cool features that I talk about below. Great presentation Nick! I really enjoyed it and even learned some new things that I didn't know! He started out showing legacy ......

I am going to miss the 2nd Silverlight/WCF User Group meeting today at noon over at Microsoft! =( Is anyone going? Can you give me a follow up on number of people,how the session went, that sort of thing? \ By the way, New Horizons of MN is going to be offering Silverlight training now! Check out our website for complete details, including an outline and dates: http://www.nhmn.com/Courses... Take note, we have a couple of 50% off sessions coming up, so take advantage ......

My second session at the TechPulse Conference is a topic called "Small Business Server 2008: Sneak Peak" presented by MyTechPartners and Success Computer Consulting (both together presented). Again, another great presentation style. They copresented and complimented each other well. The banter was back and forth and you could tell that these two organizations partner well together. Another great session guys.... Key points from the session: Who is SBS 2008 Designed for? Small (5-75 users) organizations ......

My first session at TechFuse was a WSS 3.0 seminar titled "SharePoint / KPI's" presented by Constance Potter and Shawn Fletcher from Success Computing. I really enjoyed the presentation style in this seminar. Constance was up doing all of the presenting (and she was a great presenter... not monotone and boring like some sessions I've been too). Her voice was very energetic and kept us engaged during her presentation. While she was doing the speaking, Shawn was working the demos, so it was demo and ......

I am at the TechPulse 2008 conference brought to us by MyTechPartners (http://www.mytechpartners.... and Success Computing (http://www.sccnet.com/). The website address for the conference is: http://www.techpulse2008.com/. The conference is located at the Marriott off 394 and 169. The location seems to be of good size... the break out rooms hold about 80 people in each of them, which is a good size for a conference. New Horizons of MN did not participate as a vendor at this conference this year, ......

Server 2008 Active Directory Services and Your Infrastructure - Windows Server 2008 - What's new? Registration Link: http://www.nhmn.com/Courses... Date: June 25 Time: 9am-11am Location: New Horizons of MN Seminar Room - 4510 W 77th St Suite 210 Edina MN Class Overview Windows Server 2008 introduces a number of new features that are designed to streamline the role of the Active Directory in your environment, as well as promote a dramatic change in the idea of Branch Office ......

How to Improve Employee Engagement Registration Link: http://www.nhmn.com/Courses... Date: Tuesday, June 17 from 9-11:30 at New Horizons of MN Seminar Overview This two hour seminar will explore how understanding and improving employee engagement can boost organizational effectiveness and facilitate collaboration and communication. In this interactive and thought provoking seminar, we will discuss the six key questions of employee engagement. 1. What is Employee Engagement? ......

Minneapolis InDesign User Group Twin Cities InDesign User Group Meeting Wed, Jun 25, 2008, 7:00 PM Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD) 2501 Stevens Ave. Minneapolis, MN 55404 United States of America Directions to this event Invite a friend to this event. Registration http://www.indesignusergrou... Meeting details Acrobat 9 has just been announced by Adobe, and we have Noha Edell from Adobe coming to show us what's new! All InDesign users need to understand ......

Seminar Overview Yes, I'll admit it. Not long ago I was a 90 pound quality weakling. Other developers would kick sand in my face and flex their low bug counts and rock solid code, but I just couldn't get my code integrated fast enough to fight back. I didn't even know if my entire application would compile, let alone if the pieces would all work together! It was embarrassing… humiliating even. But that was before I discovered Team System and the included build system! I started an automated build ......

This free seminar is the first in a new five-part series on Virtualization of the Data Center brought to you by Midwave and New Horizons of Minnesota. In total, the series will cover Virtualization technologies, Platform and Foundation and Operational Life Cycle. During the first seminar the presenters will define and explain the following technologies of Virtualization: desktop, distributed, mid-range, support systems, network and storage. After attendees have a clear understanding of the technology ......

New Horizons of MN (www.nhmn.com) is a Silver Sponsor at the Business Analyst World Symposium today and tomorrow at the DoubleTree Hotel - Park Place in Minneapolis. I am at our conference booth both days. There are about 120 Business Analysts here at the 2 day conference. For more information about the Symposium, which is an annual event here in the Twin Cities, visit their website at: http://www.basymposiumserie... The keynote today was on the Challenges ......

The First Bi-Annual SharePoint Camp held on Saturday, June 14 was a huge success. We had over 181 people registered to attend and we had over 140 show up on a beautiful Saturday. We had one of our first beautiful weekends in MN and people still opted to attend the camp instead of being outside! We had over 20 presenters volunteer their time, including two Microsoft reps from Redmond on the SharePoint product team. A couple of issues during the day came up, including a broken air conditioner for the ......